


the excuses that i stole

by EldritchTribble



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Ficlet, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-10
Updated: 2017-07-10
Packaged: 2018-11-30 13:58:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11465028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EldritchTribble/pseuds/EldritchTribble
Summary: After helping track down the hundred lost changelings, Odo leaves the Link once more to look for Quark.





	the excuses that i stole

**Author's Note:**

> A short, angsty abomination that came to mind while I was drafting something altogether more cheerful. It wouldn't leave me be until I committed it to paper. I'm so sorry.

_"I've been following your footprints in the snow_

_Trying to return the excuses that I stole"_

\- Kent, Stop Me June (Little Ego)

* * *

 

The muffled beat coursed through him, pulsing like the heart of a cornered animal. He drew a hand raggedly over his temple. _Right on schedule. Shouldn’t be long now._

Perhaps this had been the end toward which Odo had labored, unwittingly, all his misbegotten life. For one who saw wheels within wheels, that he would begin to comprehend his own pivotal role only now…

_"We have no further need of you.”_

The Great Link’s thought-inscription had taken such a neutral form, so carefully mapped. Evidently the crime for which he had atoned all those years ago still bore its share of reckoning-weight. The one hundred having since reconvened and reincorporated, thanks to his efforts, he could not deny the validity of the statement. Too late did he realize that his place had always assumed – would always assume – a shape that was not the Link’s understanding of Odo.

For home had never been a place after all. It had not even been the fugue state of one-ness, the thought made of consciousness beyond thought, the legion-of-naught-and-all that was the Link.

It had been the name he had croaked while twisting limbs until they broke; the name he invoked while begging for information, even as those who were collateral damage begged for mercy.

He tried to laugh at the irony and uttered only a crackling shudder.

Fitting, really, that all the anguish for which he had been responsible now stood, square-shouldered, sizing him up. Demanding payment in kind. How very Ferengi of it.

Evidently the Ferengi to whom it belonged had become loath to demand his share of the spoils. Perhaps he had simply ceased caring.

All Odo knew was that duranium shutters had closed over Quark’s eyes as they beheld each other for the first time in unfathomed years…and that Quark had hastened away with a nameless other, escaping the crowded club without as much as a backward glance. His swiftness had betrayed something which Odo recognized as an impulse to protect, though just who Quark was protecting remained unclear.

Odo stopped counting after thirty-two standard hours, after he could no longer lift his head to glance at the time.  He rustled like an autumn oak in the midnight breeze. The music continued pounding away inside, unaware of his solemn counterpoint. Life would go on.

_Not long now._

 

 

 


End file.
